In anticipation of Mother’s Day this Sunday 11 May, our staff reflect on how their mothers have shaped their reading habits.

Belle Place:

I have few memories of my mum without a book in hand. She reads widely and very quickly – the type of reader who will bring a book to the breakfast table on holidays. Aside a recent upset over My Brilliant Friend, the first book in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolit…

Here is how I ended up with a copy of Americana: I was 17 and it was lent to me by a neighbour, a professor at the university my father had worked at, who told me it was good but not Don DeLillo’s best. At the time I was like a lot of 17-year-olds who studied creative writing; likely too arrogant and too annoying to be around.

I’d borrowed the book with the idea that I wanted to read first novel…

Over the next few weeks we’re participating in a work experience program with students from high schools across Melbourne. Here, 15-year-old work experience student Anna Louey tells us about her favourite books.
How would you describe your taste in books?

As a bibliophile, I enjoy reading books from all different genres as I believe they all hold individual value. However, I particularly enjo…

If you’re a mother in a children’s book it likely means one or both of the following: (a.) you’re horribly dysfunctional, or (b.) you’re dead. So with Mother’s Day approaching (on Sunday 11 May), here are some mothers who not only made it out of the book alive, but with more than a shred of dignity.
1. Mrs Josephine Rabbit in The Tale of Peter Rabbit

I love to read and draw more than anything else in the whole world. Sometimes I do both of them at the same time! I love to read stories about Japan, where I was born. I like to learn about Manga and how to draw Manga. And I love Alice Mira…

While there are many fine books published, and it feels a great privilege to sell and promote them, it’s not so often that I come across a book I know holds the potential to have a profound effect on its reader, and the world around them. One such book, from last year, was Andrew Solomon’s Far From the Tree, which tells wide-ranging stories of parental love. Here are two recent books that struck …

Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard reminds us, in the style of Proust, that the only subject needed for a life’s work is a life itself. Though so far just half of his six-volume My Struggle cycle has appeared in English (Knausgaard’s translator, Don Bartlett, can’t work fast enough for most of his Anglophone readers), the stretch and the intensity of his project is already clear; reading volume…

Michael Pryor on the thinking behind his techno-thriller, Machine Wars, for readers of 10+.

Humanity has been fascinated by mechanical people ever since the whole idea of machines came about. You can call them robots or automatons or androids or cyborgs, all with their own variations and differences, but what they really are is a reflection of us. Robots are us but with something extra – stren…